Participants will download the Electrum software wallet and I will transfer bitcoin to each of their generated addresses (small amounts, obviously). They will be able to track the transaction in the blockchain using blockchain.info.

Presentation of clustering heuristics (how to group addresses together)

Tagging clusters leading to deanonymization

Presentation of the GraphSense open-source platform

Presentation of the kinds of clusters that exist

Hands-on exercise:
Using a dozen of bitcoin addresses, participants will be tasked to trace transactions and conclude whether it is possible to know where the money was cashed out and what can be inferred from the money flow.

Presentation of a technique to trace transactions based on outgoing/incoming relationships

Presentation of the GraphSense open-source API

Presentations of the scripts used to extract information and the open-source tools used to graph large amounts of money flows

Hands-on exercise:

For this exercise, an environment will be provided to participants with the tools and the data installed. If needed, they can easily replicate the environment at home.

Participants will be tasked to extract information from a list of addresses using the GraphSense open source API. Then, they will graph the data based on the techniques presented above.

Participants should bring:

A laptop

Participants must know or have:

For this workshop, participants do not need to have prior knowledge about bitcoin.

Masarah Paquet-Clouston
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Masarah Paquet-Clouston is a security researcher at GoSecure, a PhD student at Simon Fraser University in criminology and one of Canada’s decorated 150 scientific innovators. With her background in economics and criminology, she specializes in the study of markets behind illicit online activities. She published in several peer-reviewed journals, such as Social Networks, Global Crime and the International Journal for the Study of Drug Policy, and presented at various international conferences including WEIS, Virus Bulletin, Black Hat Europe, Botconf and the American Society of Criminology.